Vermeer Vs. Caravaggio

In the art world, there are lots of people who stand out. These people usually have had a big impact on art culture through cultivating new techniques or just being extremely good at their craft. Some of these people are recognized during their lives but a good amount of them are rediscovered only a long time after their death. No matter when or how they are discovered, they still hold an important place in art’s long history. Two of these significant people happen to be Vermeer and Caravaggio.
Vermeer was a Dutch painter, born on October 31, 1632, in Delft, Netherlands. Not much is known about him as he was only made famous a long time after his death. What is known about him is that he lived a peaceful home life with his wife, Catharina
This lax lifestyle of his influenced him to mostly paint peaceful homely images reminiscent of the comfortable home life he lived. On the other hand, Caravaggio, an Italian painter born in Milan, lived an exciting life. Orphaned at the early age of thirteen with the death of his mother, he took up an apprenticeship with Simone Peterzano, a well known painter at the time. Soon after learning what he could from Simone, he went to Rome. He was a struggling artist, who went on the streets to find someone to take him under their wing. Luckily, he found a rich patron, Giuseppe Cesari, to take him in and fund his paintings. Awhile after, Caravaggio had disputed over a tennis match which led him to kill another man. Being a wanted man and an artist, he was on the run, painting from district to district all the while escaping from the police. Caravaggio didn’t have a family of his own so he went where the wind blew. His popularity shot up after the murder, leading people scrambling to find his paintings. With his popularity, he had many followers, who
His paintings would come out very few in between. As he would have customers, not much is known about his life in general. But, we take away today the genius techniques of color contrast, subtle bending of objects and convergence point gave life to his paintings. We can take away that light can influence the mood as much as anything else from the painting can. From Caravaggio, he became extremely famous from the murder at the time, and soon after, people started to scout for his paintings to the retail market. People quickly admired him as a famous painter so they pardoned him from the murder to get him back and let him paint. Because he was on the run. He had to draw very fast so he didn’t get himself caught while in the middle of painting. Today we can see from his paintings that his art had meaning and many symbols. This tells us that art can be used to tell a riveting